Love as a Stranger

by Owen Marshall

  He parked with only a few companion vehicles, and carried his foliage with him in a supermarket bag. He thought he knew the location of Madeleine’s plot, but his confidence was misplaced. There were regulations regarding the nature and height of the gravestones in the new part of the cemetery, and the uniformity of low memorials, and their increased number since he’d last visited, confused him. Eventually he found Madeleine. The granite plaque had lost its sheen, and like so many others had been shat on by birds, with no intention of desecration. He should have brought a cloth and bucket of water, and he had no vase. Two rows away a hose was running, its rotating spray making a pulsating hiss, its snakish length bright green in the dry grass. Hartley followed the hose to the source, but that was a junction in a metal box set below ground level and with no provision for visitors to fill containers. Not far beyond the range of the spray a thin woman in light blue jeans and a white T-shirt sat cross-legged by a grave. He walked back and asked her if she knew where there was a water point. ‘There should be a place to get water for flowers, shouldn’t there?’ he said.

  She stood up, tears glinting in the sun, and walked quickly away. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hartley to her retreating figure, and she flicked a hand up behind her back, though whether in accusation, or absolution, he couldn’t tell. From a long way away came a sound like someone chopping wood, and for a short time the woman’s steps were synchronised with that and then fell out of time. He watched her diminishing among the graves. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, but softly, knowing she wouldn’t hear. She walked past his car and the few others, and went on through the headstones up the slope towards the more haphazard and varied shapes of the old part of the cemetery. ‘Be like that then,’ he said, his voice even more subdued. What had he done except ask a simple question.

  Hartley stood at the edge of the water spray and held his handkerchief out as far as he could to receive a little on each rotation. His trousers and shoes caught a bit as well, but the handkerchief became sufficiently wet for him to go back and clean Madeleine’s memorial. And without compunction he took a metal container from a grave three or four along and used it for the foliage from their home. Without water it would soon wither, but for the moment the leaves were upright and glossy. He felt no overwhelming sense of loss as he stood at his wife’s grave, but there was sadness that they had lived together for so many years without either being able to provide what the other needed. They had remained separate even in the bond of marriage. They hadn’t been slothful, cruel or unfaithful, just inwardly disappointed that life was no better together than it had been alone. Kevin, though: without the marriage he would have no child, and he loved his son. During his childhood Kevin had provided a shared focus for Madeleine and Hartley, so it wasn’t true the marriage was a failure. ‘He’s doing fine,’ he told the grave. ‘He’s in London with a nice girl and a business. He seems happy. We keep in touch. We did all right with Kevin — we can say that.’

  As Hartley walked back to his car, the wood chopping over, the noise of the water jets diminishing to a whisper at his back, it was Sarah who was in his thoughts. With her the life he had always hoped for was surely possible. They were a fit for each other in every way. At the car, Hartley stood with the doors open for a short while to allow the light breeze to take the worst of the heat from the interior, and then got in, started the engine, put on the air conditioning and a Sibelius CD. Sarah had said she loved Sibelius, too, especially the Karelia Suite, and that hadn’t surprised him. They were a fit: he knew it from the beginning.

  Halfway home he realised that he’d left his sunglasses hidden by the greenery on Madeleine’s grave, but he decided he couldn’t be bothered going back for them. They could stay there with the leaves and stems in a stolen pot, with the plaque clear and clean above them, with the woman in blue jeans in tearful retreat through the graves, for he planned no return.

  WHEN SHE CAME BACK to Auckland, Sarah didn’t agree to a meeting at the motel, but said she would meet him at the Magnus instead. As Hartley watched her walking to his table, he told himself she was just the same, yet sensed in her a purpose not entirely romantic.

  ‘How was the time at home?’ he said after they had briefly kissed. ‘It’s wonderful to have you back. I miss you, you know. All the time I miss you.’

  ‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘Look, all these texts are becoming too much for me. It’s getting so I don’t like to have the phone with me, and I’ve run out of excuses when Robert asks who’s been in touch. We’re sitting there together a lot of the day, you know that, and it’s odd if it’s turned off all the time. He used to check it for me quite often, and now he probably finds it strange that I’m not keen on that.’

  ‘I like to hear from you, to know that you think of me sometimes, and so you know I miss you.’

  ‘Well, it’s more likely to make me worried. It’s okay for you. You’re alone at home, or at work where it’s nobody else’s business who’s in touch with you. It’s different for me.’

  ‘So you could set me a ration then, a limit. Maybe a text once a day, but only after you’ve sent an all-clear signal. Maybe on alternate days, or when you’re in the loo.’ Even as he said it, he regretted the sarcasm, but couldn’t stop himself.

  Both of them were quiet for a time, looking away, Sarah moving a teaspoon back and forth on the smooth tabletop with an index finger, Hartley leaning back in excessive and counterfeit relaxation. The noise of others around them seemed to swell to fill the silence created.

  ‘Let’s not be like this,’ said Sarah finally. ‘Even if it’s not working, let’s not be this way with each other.’

  ‘It’s not working because we’re not together. You know that. In your heart you know that. It’s a hell of a situation, I know, but nothing will change until you make up your mind whether you want to be with me or not.’

  What did he expect of her? That she was going to leave her husband while he was ill and go off with a man she’d known for three months? That because they loved each other, all the other people she loved became irrelevant, all other ties negligible? That the occasional peaks of pleasure in a motel room outweighed loyalties and shared experience over more than thirty years?

  ‘I can’t start on it all today,’ she said. ‘You’re right that we have to sort things out, but not now and not here. I’m just not up to it. Going home was good, but also unsettling, and Robert starts more treatment tomorrow. Can we just leave it?’

  ‘But that doesn’t solve anything, and you said you wanted to talk.’

  ‘That was the texting, and anyway, the whole thing’s too important to talk about sitting here. We need to have time privately together, and before that have a chance to get everything clear in our own minds. I know I can’t go on like this. It’s different now somehow.’

  ‘How’s it different?’

  ‘It just is.’

  ‘Do you love me at all?’ he said. He was looking at her again, wanting her to meet his gaze. He had never thought it necessary to ask before. Abandoning his previous pose, he was all forward intensity once more.

  ‘I do,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s what makes it so difficult. I love you and other people as well. There’s life with you and other lives, too. We’re not Romeo and Juliet you know, not at our age.’

  ‘Sure, okay, but there’s a choice you—’

  ‘No, I won’t talk about it now. I said that. Not here and not before you think it over,’ and having interrupted him, Sarah stood up and briefly touched his wrist. ‘But you’re right, we do need to talk. Soon we will, I promise. Now I’ve got to go.’ As she walked from the café, turning her hips a little in the confined space between tables, Hartley felt that something between them had been stretched farther and farther, and then snapped with an almost physical impact.

  He stayed sitting there, aware now that Sarah had gone of things around him: the marshmallows left on a saucer at the next table, one white, one pink, the bald man laughing close by, the Chinese waitress with an a
ppealing smile and slightly bowed legs, sunlight a-glitter on the glass fronts of the food trays. All that and more came flooding into the emotional space created by Sarah’s absence. And as well there began in the left periphery of vision the drifting dislocations that presaged a migraine. The lettering on the menu board began a vibratory deconstruction, sounds seemed at a greater remove. Bugger, he thought. He needed to leave straight away, get home before the light became unbearable, before the pain above his left eye and the vomiting began. Bugger. Soon the world would begin a dancing dissolution.

  ‘Not your bloody headaches again,’ his father used to say. ‘Take a bowl to bed with you for Christ’s sake, then, so you’re not sick on the blankets or the floor. It’s time you grew out of them, isn’t it? The others don’t seem to have any trouble.’ As he drove home, Hartley deliberately thought about his father, not at all from affection, but in a futile effort to delay the onset of the migraine.

  His father in gumboots hosing down the concrete floor of the milking shed, or feeding out, turned back in the tractor seat to watch the trailer. His father’s constant, indiscriminate swearing at both stock and inanimate objects on the farm, his father eating as he read the paper, with the unexamined food just a form of necessary refuelling, his father’s complex expression of embarrassment and derision at any display of finer feelings. His father dressed for the races in a suit long become too small for him. His father strangling a Friesian cow by ineptly dragging it from the bog with a rope tied to the tractor. His father’s patent disregard of his mother’s feelings. His father’s dismissive impatience when Hartley didn’t measure up to any job at hand. ‘For Christ’s sake, boy, give it here.’

  His father’s greatest pleasure seemed to be in the misfortunes of his fellows. Despite himself, a slight, hard smile would crease his mouth when he heard that the bank had foreclosed on Alistair Prue, that old Mrs Patchett had driven off Coal Pit Road, that lightning had struck the newly renovated war memorial, or that the youngest Hargest girl was pregnant to a rabbiter from Omakau.

  Hartley couldn’t recall his father ever touching him with affection, or asking much of him except to perform a duty. It’ll all be the same in a hundred years, his father used to say to curb any enthusiasm. Whatever else Hartley had to endure in life, he hoped not to become like his father.

  The next day was a Wednesday, one of the two weekdays on which he still went in to Hastings Hull Legal Associates, but Hartley rang and said he wasn’t up to it, told Gillian that his appointments would have to be rescheduled. He lay in bed with the curtains drawn until after nine, then got up, had a cup of packet chicken soup, sat on the leather sofa and worried about Sarah and himself. After the migraine attack he was washed out and knew he needed to just sit with a clear mind, but whatever train of thought he started on always led back to Sarah. Sarah at the exhibition of Samoan art, walking with him in the city parks and streets, beneath him in the white motel, talking and laughing with him in the café, making a trio with the white dog on Omaha Beach, sitting with him and looking over the varied green bush to central Auckland that one afternoon, just as he was doing now. A mere turn of his head and he could see the photo he’d taken of her at Magnus, despite her reluctance.

  It would be over, unless he did something to ensure the best outcome for them both. If he weren’t man enough to take command of the situation then all the forces of inertia, anxiety, irresolution, would bear down and suffocate their love. You had to fight for the most important things even if you lost, otherwise you never knew if they were possible.

  Hartley understood that it was a more difficult and exacting decision for Sarah than for him. She had a sick husband, a daughter and grandchildren, a comfortable, long-established life of activities, friends and prospects, while he was single, dissatisfied even with the memory of the woman he’d married, though only recently had he admitted that to himself. Yes, he must be insistent, make the things happen that would allow the two of them to be together. If he failed to do so, the random drift of life would separate them.

  It occurred to him that what he imagined would be so fulfilling with Sarah, he had never met in the marriages of others, or his own, but that increased its value rather than proving attainment impossible. What he was determined to avoid was the barely suppressed impatience that his father showed towards his mother, and the meek, but resolute, disappointment she bore in response. What did his own son think of his parents? Would that show whether Hartley had learnt anything from the example of his father and mother? He would ring Kevin, talk to the only family who shared in his life at all now. What time would it be in the great grey expanse of London in winter?

  Kevin was there, on the point of going to bed, but happy to talk.

  ‘You got the money for your birthday?’ Hartley asked him.

  ‘I did. Thank you. I’ve been meaning to get in touch, but it’s been pretty hectic here. My best driver left all of a sudden and I’ve been in the vans as well as keeping up with the paperwork. They go on about all these guys unemployed, but it’s still so hard to get good people. So many are fucked up one way or another, or they just want to make a few pounds and piss off over the Channel.’

  ‘How’s Anna?’

  ‘Good, thanks. She’s still doing community social work with the elderly. In time I hope she can come into the office for me full-time. She sees some real characters. You have to laugh or cry, she says.’

  ‘So when do I get an invitation to the wedding?’ Hartley’s tone was light, and his son laughed.

  ‘Well, it’ll happen. No doubt about that. It’ll happen when we’re not so damn busy, and her mother’s not good at the moment. Some respiratory thing they don’t seem to be able to get to the bottom of. When she’s come right we’re definitely thinking about it.’

  ‘Still, you’re happy together and that’s the main thing.’ Hartley wandered onto the deck with the phone to his ear. In a puriri tree a tui flicked from branch to branch, the tuft of white throat feathers glinting in sunlight. The Sky Tower and the centre of Auckland were clear, but subdued at that remove. The fragrance of the bush moved up the slope. He could imagine the dark cityscape about his son’s flat as they talked, but didn’t ask about it. London in winter wasn’t unknown to him.

  ‘Anyway, Dad, you don’t have to wait for a wedding invitation to come over to see us. Get on a plane. Get yourself over here and use us as a base to have a decent holiday.’

  ‘I might just do that,’ said Hartley, and after a brief pause, ‘I’ve met someone here recently. A really nice woman.’

  ‘Good on you.’ Kevin didn’t sound surprised, or especially curious.

  ‘I’m hoping it will work out. We get on well together.’

  ‘Bring her over,’ said Kevin. ‘You’re both welcome.’ It was typical of his open, uncomplicated way. The inhibitions and anxieties that marked both Madeleine and Hartley seemed to have passed him by.

  Hartley wanted to ask him personal things, but it was too late in their relationship for that, too great a distance both physically and emotionally.

  ‘Anyway, it’s nice to have someone to share things with. Her name’s Sarah.’ Kevin didn’t say anything, but it wasn’t a hostile silence. ‘So the business is ticking over okay?’ Hartley asked, after the pause. ‘Aren’t things supposed to be pretty tough there?’

  ‘Actually we’re getting by not too badly. As I said, keeping good staff is the main bugbear. There’s plenty of business if you’re prepared to get stuck in. I’ve got four vans now.’

  ‘That’s really good.’

  He knew Kevin was a grown man and was talking to him as such, but the image he had was of a boy: a quiet boy of modest accomplishment who had never demanded, or received, special attention. Hartley would have liked an assurance that he’d been a good father, better than his own, but you don’t ask that of your children. He took comfort that Kevin had never accused him in any way, though that was no guarantee grievance didn’t exist. He talked of mundane things with his son
on the other side of the world. No more was said of Sarah. He kept the image of his son as a schoolboy, and was somehow rendered both sad and happy. He remembered the Christmas they had bought Kevin a new bike. He was thirteen, but he came into their bed and hugged them both fiercely. Hartley could see him still: smiling, his hair roughed up, his thin wrists well beyond the cuffs of the red pyjamas he was outgrowing.

  ‘I’m really pleased things are going well for you,’ Hartley said as the phone call ended. It was his way of telling his son he loved him. Love for their son was the most significant bond that Hartley and Madeleine had shared: something endorsed and understood, when so much else of each other’s character was difficult to access.

  Hartley had wanted to protect his son, give more than his own father had offered, but from an early age Kevin had wanted to be with other kids, and usually at their homes rather than his own. Hartley had always supposed that was natural enough, but it had disappointed him all the same. He wished he had a recollection of any particular occasion on which he’d accomplished something at least mildly heroic in his son’s eyes.

  Often when he was recovering from a migraine, Hartley found a walk helped. So after the phone call, he took a cap bearing the name of a golf club he didn’t belong to, put on the yellow and white sneakers that unbeknown to him Sarah disliked, and walked into Titirangi. Trees and ponga grew close to the road, and shaded him as he went, and when he looked into them the spaces were dark and soft like cows’ eyes. Two or three steps into that bush and you vanished from the world. He didn’t hurry. He still felt shaky after bouts of puking in the night, his stomach muscles tender from the spasms, but his head was clear and he was starting to think about food without total repugnance. Few cars passed, and when they did, he kept well to the side, walked resolutely with eyes ahead so drivers understood he wasn’t looking for a lift. Most of the time it was so quiet he could hear bird calls and the sound of his own footfall.